The long tailed tits were on the bird feeders. They travel in gangs at this time of the year, and flit about so rapidly it's hard to count them, but there must have been nine or ten. They are jolly little birds, like black and buff feathery ping pong balls with ridiculously long tails. As the flock tears round the garden it makes a high peeping noise, so that you often hear them before you see them. Just now they were doing what small birds do, which is to have a final feed before night falls, to see them through the dark, cold hours.
I used to wonder if I was imagining it, that after I'd remembered to restock the bird table mid morning there would then be a dearth of birds for several hours. Then I heard a piece on Radio 4 confirming what we'd thought from observations at home, that garden birds need to feed first thing in the morning to replenish their energy, then in the middle of the day they spend relatively more time doing other things. Being birds. Preening, eyeing up other birds, staking out territories or just lounging about, before the evening rush to feed again.
According to Radio 4, one of the effects of the cocktail of human drugs that make their way intact through our systems and into our sewage works is to disrupt normal patterns of feeding behaviour in starlings. I had better stick my hand up and confess that I was doing something else at the same time as listening to the radio and didn't fully grasp the experimental methodology, but the gist of the conclusion was that starlings feeding on the wealth of grubs and insects at sewage farms were losing their urge to feed early and late in the day. Dosed up on tranquillisers, they were nibbling through the day but not eating with the intensity that they ought. I think the scientists doing the study did test the water for levels of medication, but obviously to draw firm conclusions you'd need to treat starlings with measured doses of Prozac and then compare their foraging behaviour to a control group.
Less welcome visitors to the bird table are the squirrels. We have gone for years without their coming anywhere near the bird feeders. They have the whole of the wood to live in, and have left the environs of the house to us, until now. The Systems Administrator is a handy shot with an air rifle and took two out, but they are not slow learners, squirrels, and they now know to nip out of the way the second the SA appears around the corner of the house with a gun. And no, we did not eat them, which we probably should have on strictly ethical grounds, having killed them, but watching Jennifer Lawrence skin a squirrel in Winter's Bone was quite enough for me. I don't particularly want them to be shot, and if they would learn to give the bird table a wide berth as they always did in the past that would be ideal, but neither do I want to pay to keep them in sunflower hearts for the rest of the winter.
Walking down to the post box I noticed for the first time that at our temporary dog's house the bird feeder is suspended on several metres of fishing line from a large tree. We are clearly not the only ones with squirrel issues.
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